I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

Confirmed: Google Glass Will Tether With Android And iPhone For 3G Or 4G Data

Google opened up a sort of pre-order contest for civilians (i.e., non-developers) this week for its new augmented reality headgear that should ship before the end of 2013 for $1,500 (for those with a clever enough idea.) The other significant news is that both CNET and The Verge report that “Glass will be able to connect via Bluetooth to both Android phones and the iPhone. Glass can pull down data from wifi or use the 3G or 4G feed from a connected phone, but it won’t have its own cellular radio.”

It’s nice to see that Google is not escalating the platform wars by locking iOS out of the Glass ecosystem. In truth, that would not have been in Google’s best interest. The whole point of Google’s strategy is to increase the flow of information as many ways as possible. Also, as with the rumored iWatch, squeezing a cellular radio (and another data plan) into the device doesn’t make much sense, especially since the entire target audience already has a smart phone.

The bigger question with Glass, for me, is how users will manage—and to what extent they will be allowed to manage—the huge potential torrent of data that this device will collect. The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky had a hands-on (or face-on!) with Glass at Google’s NYC HQ (and a local Starbucks) and found it very easy to acclimate to. “The privacy issue is going to be a big hurdle for Google with Glass,” he writes. “Almost as big as the hurdle it has to jump over to convince normal people to wear something as alien and unfashionable as Glass seems right now.”

I don’t think fashionability is going to be an issue, boundaries will be. Glass, product director Steve Lee tells Topolsky, ”It’s a very intimate device. We’d like to better understand how other people are going to use it. We think they’ll have a great opportunity to influence and shape the opportunity of Glass by not only giving us feedback on the product, but by helping us develop social norms as well.”

Topolsky asks about “Glass etiquette,” and wonders how “to answer questions about what’s right and wrong to do with a camera that doesn’t need to be held up to take a photo, and often won’t even be noticed by its owner’s subjects. Will people get comfortable with that? Are they supposed to?”

He hits on what is the most radical thing about Glass, the ability to record what is right in front of you, unobtrusively, in real time. Glass will so completely remove the friction from this process that we are all bound to record—and be recorded—without even thinking about it. This is great from a data flow perspective, and remarkable in terms of social science and, of course, marketing. But it places us smack in the middle of the user experience paradox of Glass.

Lee and lead industrial designer for Glass, Isabelle Olsson, told Topolsky about the questions that led them through the product development process. “What if we brought technology closer to your senses?” Lee asks “Would that allow you to more quickly get information and connect with other people but do so in a way—with a design—that gets out of your way when you’re not interacting with technology?” So this is supposed to make us more present than the hunched over masses staring at their smart phones. ”I don’t want to do that, you know? I don’t want to be that person,” says Olsson.

But if the technology is so close to our sense so as to become prosthetic—a great outcome in terms of design—how do we maintain appropriate boundaries? This is the great experiment of Glass and really for the entire “connected world.” In this way, Google is much farther ahead than Apple with its supposed iWatch. Glass’s technology is even closer to us physically, even closer (it seems) in coming to market and more active. The iWatch, like most Apple mobile products, will be more about consuming than creating content. Glass, in contrast, will be a documentary studio in an eyeglass case!

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I wonder about the price. You could also say that $1,500 is the “early bird special” and that the final price could be higher. I hope not. As I wrote in my previous piece, the big risk of Glass culturally is that we just see more and more content through the eyes of those who are already well represented on the internet—the rich, the famous and the trendy!

I rather think it will be more spendy when it hits the public market, consider the further development that’s still pending and an updateable capacity as more and more improvement and abilities are augmented..that’s not likely to come along as a freebie!(imho) lol

I think that’s the idea. It seems to me that it is in social situations that the potential distraction are more problematic. But considering how distracted everyone seems to be in social situations by their devices now anyway, I wonder how much a problem this really is.

Considering that humans are usually much more aware of their surroundings that they realize, I would tend to think that as with any skill this will become as second nature to those who wear/use the glass on a fairly continual basis. We don’t begin to realize all that we process through visual perception and we are very purpose driven in an effort to “make” something happen when we WANT it badly enough. Being “socially distracted” will become the norm, at some point eye contact will go by the way. Others will realize that attention has to be divided and it will no longer be an issure..rudeness will not fall into that catagory any longer.

Allowing it to be tethered to smartphones/tablets seems natural to me. It would also the Glasses to use the smartphone’s greater memory storage and processing power, and allow you to control stuff you see on the Glasses with your hands.

A great technology — doomed to fail because it ignores patterns of how great technologies actually get adopted. This is a great, if expensive, PR stunt for Google. To gain real traction with users, the company should have aimed to be less revolutionary and more in-sync with the jobs that people are really trying to get done in their lives. See my analysis at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenwunker/2012/07/03/making-revolutionary-ideas-simple/